Organization Woes

Being in Minnesota during the winter and not being a skiier, snowboarder, or lover of being out in the cold for no good reason I often am confronted with hours of free time (and by free time, I mean time that I could be using for productive things but choose to be lazy instead) to waste away indoors.

Since Rochester doesn't offer a ton of stuff to do in indoor environments, I find myself putting my big screen tv to a lot of use, and also my computer monitor when I feel like being a troll and locking myself up in my room for an evening. Since I hate dealing with commercials and don't find much of what's on television worth watching, I watch a lot of movies and tv series that I buy on DVD. That way I don't have to deal with commercials and I can watch them whenever the heck I want to.

Now most normal, semi-sane people would simply put all of their DVDs on a rack or shelf and be done with it. I, however, am far from normal and semi-sane. In fact, you could easily think of me as both moderately insane and OCD over how I organize my DVD collection. I often wonder if I am, kidding aside, a little OCD over how I organize some things (such as DVDs, video games, comics, books, and more).

I noticed my OCD popping up very strongly this evening while I was watching Intolerable Cruelty. Recently I had purchased a new DVD rack to go with the two I already have since I was running out of space to store my ever expanding and already too huge to handle collection of DVDs.

As I was watching the movie my gaze kept wandering between my media racks wondering what would be the absolute best way to categorize my movies. I'd honestly lose track of the movie at times, lost in thought about hair-brained organizational schemes that would properly capture my unique and odd classifications.

After the movie was over I spent about 20 minutes totally reorganizing all of my DVDs. On my large rack I now have the top two rows dedicated to cds--the top row is for spoken word discs, my Tori Amos discography, and CDs I am probably going to sell soon and the second row is for all of my rock and metal cds. The bottom three rows are for DVDs.

The middle row and half of the fourth row house all of my movies that I have not yet watched. I know, I know, I shouldn't keep buying movies if I never get around to buying them but freakin' Hollywood always has to have 4 for $20 sales all the time. Anyways, the other half of the fourth row and half of the bottom house all of the DVD box sets I have not watched. I blame Amazon.com and Christmas for these. The last half row of shelf space is dedicated to my Lord of the Rings and Star Trek movie collections. Yes, I am a dork, geek, and nerd all wrapped into one. But I do have friends... that aren't imaginary... honest.

Fine, don't believe me. Jerks.

On my other shelves I have organized all of the DVD box sets and movies that I have already watched, keeping related titles next to each other. Once I had finally finished, it was as if a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders, albeit a light weight, but a weight nonetheless.

Seriously, now that I think about it, I probably spend just as much time organizing my various material possesions as I do actually enjoying them. Sad. I'm now feeling guilty about owning all of these things and not utilizing them enough. Dammit, now I'm going to have to stay up all night watching movies!